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Latest Comments by Pikolo
NVIDIA reveal more GPU driver security flaws for May 2026
19 May 2026 at 5:29 pm UTC

These are relatively old versions, seems like the disclosure NDA time extended beyond the driver release date. I'm on 580.142 and Kubuntu 24.04 is not the most bleeding edge distro

Blender change the Anthropic AI funding deal, with discussions planned for AI Policies
1 May 2026 at 6:44 pm UTC Likes: 3

That's so sad. Recurring donations are much better than one-off grants, so I'm sad Blender got bullied into a worse donation.

"Adding policies" almost never makes things better, and short of a policy on how they want contributors to disclose the usage of AI in coding, I'm not sure where it would possibly be relevant. It's open source, so they can't prevent a bot controlling the mouse/running commands to edit a model in Blender anyway!

Firefox v149 is getting a free built-in VPN and other new features
19 Mar 2026 at 12:03 pm UTC Likes: 5

50 GB is plenty for anything that's not video. My mobile data plan is 2GB and non-video calling and streaming applications don't use more than ~500 Mb a month.

But I can't see how they can possibly keep it free

The Godot powered Slay the Spire 2 has already hit over 3 million sales
16 Mar 2026 at 6:59 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: vertigoSteam workshop support could be absolutely massive. I'll still be holding off until the game leaves EA though.
It makes sense not to add Steam Workshop support too early - you could break mods with changes, and you're likely to have the biggest changes early on

Discord rolls out a nice improvement for video calls on Linux
13 Mar 2026 at 10:04 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Philadelphus
Quoting: Pikolo
Quoting: PhiladelphusI did notice that video backgrounds were a thing recently while video-chatting with my brother. Nice to see that finally happen.

What does doing "\@everyone" actually do? It's unclear from the patch note.
It was working the same as @everyone (mentioning everyone giving them a notification), but without warning you that you're sending a very broad notification
Thanks! I'm just still unclear what an "escaped mention" is, or at least what it's supposed to do. If "\@everyone" does the same as "@everyone" now (if I understand the fix)…what's the point of the backslash? 🤔 Or does it do something different now? What does "\@<user>" do differently from "@user"?
It's not supposed to do anything besides showing the text ;) It's a relatively common issue in programming - you want to be able to do more than just show the literal text, but sometimes you need to show the very sequence of characters that would normally do something special.

One place it comes up is in error messages and instruction manuals - if you want to tell the user how to achieve and effect, you need to show them the "magic words", but not "cast the spell". Backslash is a very common escape character. If you want to actually show a backslash in a language where it's an escape character, you escape the escape character itself - so `\\` would show up as `\` in javascript strings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_character [External Link]

Discord rolls out a nice improvement for video calls on Linux
10 Mar 2026 at 7:02 pm UTC

Quoting: PhiladelphusI did notice that video backgrounds were a thing recently while video-chatting with my brother. Nice to see that finally happen.

What does doing "\@everyone" actually do? It's unclear from the patch note.
It was working the same as @everyone (mentioning everyone giving them a notification), but without warning you that you're sending a very broad notification

Ubuntu and Fedora devs comment on California's new Digital Age Assurance Act
4 Mar 2026 at 7:13 pm UTC Likes: 2

If the law actually allows applications to rely on an OS supplied age instead of forcing application authors to try to steal identity documents or face scans, this could be a privacy improvement.

Think of all the data breaches with Discord being forced by the UK government to ask for user IDs - if they could rely on a device API, that could be avoided

European Commission gathering feedback on the importance of open source
12 Jan 2026 at 5:36 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: LoudTechieMy proposals were.
Publish cryptographic hashes of restricted material, so small player can collaborate to implement filters for illegal information like CSAM and copyright protected material allowing them to more cheaply preform moderation responsibilities.
Perceptual hashing [External Link], used for copyrighted content and CSAM detection is very different from cryptographic hashing. The goal is to catch images and videos that are "sufficiently similar". It's as vague as it sounds, and unless configured with a very low sensitivity is guaranteed to cause false positives. When configured with low sensitivity, it's possible to bypass. When you take into account the quantity of CSAM perceptual hashes out there, false positives happen regularly. So you can either block everything, or block random things. Far from a solved problem

Using perceptual hashing for copyright enforcement is even worse, because the algorithm has no way to account for exceptions to copyright [External Link]. That should always be a human's judgement call, but with copyright trolls in the picture you get a lot of pressure towards false positives.